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September 19, 2004 NYTIMES
Booze, Babes and Introspection
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
CHICAGOLots of people who give up a nasty crack cocaine habit and then almost die do something predictable, like find Jesus, buy a minivan, take up yoga. Not Felix Dennis, the wealthy British founder of the raunchy men's magazine Maxim. Mr. Dennis — who still lives a pretty close approximation of the Maxim ideal, complete with booze and babes and expensive diesel-fueled toys — has become a poet.
Last Tuesday night, at a stop on his first American poetry tour, Mr. Dennis seated himself on a bar stool on stage at Green Dolphin Street, a jazz club on the edge of Lincoln Park, and recited from his work before an audience of about 200.
The first poem he would perform, he said, was called "Never Go Back."
"Never go back, never go back," he said solemnly into the microphone. Video clips of nature scenes and country houses and young boys hugging dogs flashed on the monitors behind him. Moody electronic music filtered through the speakers. Mr. Dennis, bathed in blue and white lights, sipped from a glass of wine he kept on the lectern, which was decorated with a portrait of — guess who? — Mr. Dennis, holding his hands to his head in a modified "Scream" pose.
He continued: "Never return to the haunts of your youth." The music, and his voice, got stormier. It is safe to say that in Mr. Dennis's most intense moments there is some accidental expectoration. "Keep to the track, to the beaten track, memory holds all you need of the truth."
At intermission reactions were mixed. After all, with all the special effects and Mr. Dennis's accent, its working-class edges blunted by the polished tones of wealth, the performance was at times eerily evocative of the scene in the 1984 film "This is Spinal Tap," in which Nigel, the self-serious English rock star, recites a poem ("And, oh, how they danced, the little children of Stonehenge, beneath the haunted moon, for fear that daybreak might come too soon") as a comically miniature model of Stonehenge is lowered onto the stage behind him.
One young woman walked directly out of the performance room, stuck her hand into the street and shouted for a taxi. But another woman, in a rhinestone-studded tank top, was preparing to ask Mr. Dennis to autograph her body; she had not yet decided which part.
To be sure, Mr. Dennis is not your average poet. He travels by private jet and his entourage includes three girlfriends (he said). But he is evangelical about his work, paying about $500,000 of his own money for a cross-country tour so he can share his ouevre at 17 performances with whomever will listen. Clearly he is not expecting to earn that money back through sales of his $12.95 volume. He is that rarity, a multimillionaire who can forfeit the commercial principles that made him wealthy in the first place in order to show off his work to audiences.
The trip is called the "Did I Mention the Free Wine? Felix Dennis U.S. Poetry Tour 2004," and Mr. Dennis, a passionate wine drinker, is providing bottomless supplies of good French Bordeaux and Burgundies, with hors d'ouevres, to anyone who will sit still for his 90-minute performance.
"Oh, the wine," he said earlier on Tuesday over lunch in his 45th-floor suite at the Four Seasons. "That's really nothing more than a gimmick to ensure that we all have a good time."
At 57, Mr. Dennis is a stylish, if not slender, man. A personal shopper buys his clothes, along with the household items in his residences in Connecticut, Warwickshire, London, Manhattan and on Mustique, the private island in the Caribbean known as a playground for the rich. On Tuesday he was wearing a pair of green pants and a cream-colored button-down shirt with a pair of Armani loafers in pristine, creamy nubuck leather. His hair sproinged around his head and face in bushy gray curls, and a pair of custom-made tortoiseshell bifocals reflected the blue light from Lake Michigan.
He is not modest when asked to characterize his work. "I'm a damned good poet," Mr. Dennis said.
The muse visited him for the first time a little less than four years ago, he said, after he had shaken off an expensive crack cocaine addiction. "It was a bit more than $2,000 a day," Mr. Dennis said. "You can't get much for $2,000 a day if you've got three bimbos sitting around with you, you know."
Once he kicked the habit, he became seriously, mysteriously ill, and spent weeks in a hospital undergoing tests. "They wouldn't let you do anything, no phone calls, no visitors, but the one thing they couldn't stop me from doing was writing," he said. Eventually, doctors discovered that his thyroid gland had ceased functioning.
Seven hundred poems later, he has not stopped. His daily schedule includes four hours for writing. And his work bears all the hallmarks of success: Miramax Books published his collection, "A Glass Half Full," last week. On the cover of the new edition, there are blurbs from Mick Jagger ("I enjoy his poetry immensely") and Tom Wolfe, who calls him "a 21st-century Kipling."
The book was published in Britain in 2002, to scant reviews, though Time Out London wrote that "half full is more than half empty here." The book, however, did sell out its 10,000-copy press run.
"I'm religious about my writing habits," Mr. Dennis said. "I take Mark Twain's advice on writing, which is first comes the inspiration, then the application of the seat to the chair."
(Unfortunately Twain never dispensed such advice. An early 20th-century writer named Mary Heaton Vorse coined the phrase, "The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.")
His new line of work is pretty far out of step with the Maxim party line, which celebrates booze, babes and a confident bluster. Now, it appears that Mr. Dennis is showing off his soft inner girlie-man.
The poem "Love Came to Visit Me," for example, begins: "Love came to visit me/Shy as a fawn,/But finding me busy/She fled with the dawn." Another reads in its entirety: "True coin — the finest armour ever wrought!/With such as this I smote love in the dust,/And conquered worlds, but now that time grows short/No smithies' art can free my heart of rust."
Is it possible that Mr. Dennis is over the whole Maxim gestalt, over all the jokes about beer and flatulence and Nazis, and this poetry thing signals a new era for him? Was his heart wounded so badly when he was young that something broke inside of him, and a hard carapace formed over his injured soul?
"No, nothing broke inside of me," Mr. Dennis said. "But I did grow some armor." He admitted that the editor in chief of Miramax Books, Jonathan Burnham, insisted he add some poems to the American edition that reflected "that carapace thing you're talking about."
The son of a single mother, Mr. Dennis grew up poor and dropped out of school at 15 to sell magazines. While he is most often associated with the hugely successful Maxim, he built his empire with less racy staples like Kung-Fu Monthly and TV Sci-Fi Monthly. Today, Dennis Publishing owns 19 magazines in Britain, most of them car and computer titles. The company publishes four magazine in the United States: Maxim, Stuff, Blender and The Week. Mr. Dennis estimates his personal worth at anywhere from $300 million to $700 million.
He has never been married.
"What, who would marry a selfish, self-centered person like me?" he said, with a snorting laugh. He has never had children, although two women did claim in the past that he was the father of their offspring.
"My attitude is, `Fine, darling, straight down to the blood clinic with you,' " he said. "And both of them turned out not to be mine." He does not plan to have children at this point in his life. "You cannot properly bring up children when you are 69 or 70 and they are 12 and at the height of their madness," he said. "You can physically do it, but I don't think it's morally justified."
His tour started in Minneapolis, and ends in Miami on Oct. 5. A performance scheduled for Friday night in New York City aroused such interest that a second performance on Thursday night was tacked on at the last minute. Tomorrow he and several members of the Royal Shakespeare Company will perform his work for the benefit of the Shakespeare troupe at a cost of $200 a ticket.
If the tour seems long by the standards of most contemporary poets, it is. Last year Franz Wright, the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, was sent on a four-city tour by his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.
At Green Dolphin Street, some listeners compared the performance to a poetry slam. "Yeah, without the irony," said Heather Gordon, 28, who wore a T-shirt that spelled "SEXIE." She shot a glance around the group. "Um, I have a master's degree in literature."
Joan Prims, who drove an hour from a northern suburb to attend the performance, said she was disappointed. Ms. Prims said she had discovered Mr. Dennis's poetry on the Internet and was intrigued by the sound of his voice. But his theatrics got to her. "It just seemed" — Ms. Prims paused and used a word that would make Mr. Dennis cringe — "needy." She and a companion left.
David Frank, an entrepreneur who said he is starting up a casino and gaming television network, enjoyed the reading. "I have not been a big fan of poetry readings," he said. But seeing Mr. Dennis's "passionate, poignant delivery changed all that."
Professional poets asked to critique a sample of Mr. Dennis's work were critical but encouraging. Nicholas Christopher, a poet whose most recent book is "Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems 1972-2004" (Harcourt, 2004), wrote in an e-mail message that it was to Mr. Dennis's credit that he finds artistic nourishment in the writing of poetry. But he suggested that Mr. Dennis lay off the clichés and added that a little humility was in order.
"Poetry is not a particularly democratic art," Mr. Christopher wrote. "One can no more wake up and begin writing poetry on a high order than can perform cardiac surgery or compete at professional tennis."
Ouch. Billy Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States, put Mr. Dennis's work at the intersection of Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash. "Unfortunately he lacks her bite and his endearing whimsy, so he opens himself to getting run over by any number of speeding critics," Mr. Collins wrote by e-mail. "But what harm? Surely far less than if a poet attempted to launch a men's magazine."
